Abstract:Based on the Silk Road Economic Zone, this paper studies the hazmat route optimization problem by road-rail intermodal transport. When organizing the intermodal transport of hazmat by road-rail, choosing route is crucial to reduce operational risks and transport costs. This paper analyzes systematically the transportation costs and risks of both the highway and the railway, and establishes a multi-objective nonlinear optimization model that consider both costs (transportation costs, carbon emissions costs, and soft time window penalty costs) and risks (transportation risks). Through linear weighting the optimal model is transformed into a single-objective one, and an improved Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-Ⅱis designed to solve it. The process of population initialization is improved, the elite strategy of cooperative selection is introduced, and the crossover operator is enhanced as well. Finally, a numerical example is solved. whose result shows that the improved NSGA-Ⅱ algorithm is more uniform in spatial distribution, and the front span is larger. The optimized transportation scheme owns fewer transportation nodes and shorter transportation path, simultaneously; Compared with NSGA-Ⅱalgorithm, the total costs and risks obtained by this algorithm decreased dramatically, Besides, both the searching ability and the solving accuracy are significantly improved.